Sistema Venture Capital

Business description

Sistema Venture Capital is a corporate venture fund of Sistema, focused on investing in Internet companies at the growth stage. As of 31 December 2016, Sistema owned 100% of the fund.

In 2016, the fund was active on the Russian and CIS markets. In 2017, it intends to enter the US market to become a global player and gain access to the world’s leading projects. In 2016, Sistema Venture Capital became a prominent player both on the Russian venture capital market and on the European VR/AR market (becoming one of Europe's top 3 funds investing in VR/AR by number of deals). The fund's team reviewed over 500 projects and closed 6 deals (including transfer of Sistema's stake in Ozon Holding Limited to the fund).

MEL Science - an international company offering scientific and educational products based on VR/AR technology. Its flagship product is a course for independent study of chemistry, MEL Chemistry: it comprises 38 kits for chemical experiments, a learning app and VR glasses that allow users to see chemical substances and crystals "from inside". MEL Science kits are sold under a paid subscription model and delivered by post.

VisionLabs - one of the world's leaders in computer vision and machine learning. Its flagship product is a face recognition platform, VisionLabs LUNA, which enables the analysis of vast amounts of photo and video data in real-time mode to detect people's faces and run them against multi-million databases. The company's technological partners are Intel, Cisco, Facebook and Google.

Segmento - Russia's biggest programmatic platform, which uses machine learning technologies for targeting digital ads. Segmento uses anonymised data of about 84m customers of Sberbank and knowledge about their online behaviour for real-time communications on all types of devices. Its solutions enable large businesses to interact with potential customers in any channel and to boost their sales.

Luden.io develops instructive games with a scientific component based on VR technologies. The best known games are InMind and InCell, devoted to studying biology while playing. The company was set up by one of Russia's oldest game developers, Nival.

YouDo.com - Russia's biggest online service connecting customers with service providers for performing household errands and business tasks. A user can publish a task on the YouDo.com website or in a mobile app (available for iOS and Android), set the price and select a provider among those who respond to the announcement. All providers are checked by the service and are assessed by users, which guarantees the high quality of their work. The project is a winner of a grant from Start Fellows, Runet and Golden Website awards, semifinalist of the Forbes' startup competition, and one of Russia's top 50 startups according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and Digital October.